VP Blog

Do you understand what the day to day will look like for the Enterprise-Sales Opening? How about for the VP of Marketing and Public Relations? What about the Director of Finance? Successful recruiting teams know enough about each unique position to be dangerous. Especially, if they are tasked with sending personalized messages and conducting initial phone screenings. This includes the KPI’s the candidates will be held to if hired, how this role improves the company, what problems it solves, and the growth potential.

For many, this concept is great in theory but is unmanageable. It’s common for opportunities to lack an abundance of current internal resources. There may only be one person who could draft a specific job description due to its complexity. Whoever is leading the search should make it a top priority to get face time with those internal experts or outside resources as much as possible to speed up their timelines early on. If this doesn’t happen, you risk candidates not taking the role seriously after a negative first impression, hiring managers wasting their time with interviews, and a whole lot of guessing which is stressful.

2. Have a proactive approach for every role

Often, the best and most valuable candidates intersect with the companies who make talent acquisition a priority. Therefore, implementing a tailored campaign strategy w/ timelines per unique position is necessary. Abiding to realistic timelines of milestones that increase the chances of success, minimizes the need for guessing how close you are to your new hire. Milestones include, personal messages sent, number of phone screenings, number of candidates submitted to the hiring manager, final interviews, and offers.

Investing in licensing and premium access to recruiting software’s is normal and not wasted money. Investing your time in training and exploring the landscape of these available platforms daily is not either.

3. Be 100% prepared for challenges

What if you knew that you wouldn’t fill the role until you overcame 2 different challenges? The chances that one of the below occurs is likely:

Candidates withdraw interest

Timelines get conflicted

Budget runs thin

Internal changes delay or change the process

Take pride in minimizing the potential for challenges. Be prepared for these moments by:

Always having backups

Setting interview process expectations early

Responding to quality inbound leads immediately

Constantly communicating with hiring managers and candidates

4. Don’t fall behind!

Just like laundry, bills, or dishes, your recruiting to-do list piles up fast. Before you know it, the workload of initial screenings scheduled starts to cut into your sourcing time. You begin to push off tasks that were due on Thursday to Monday because your inbox is so backed up. You begin to rationalize that if you had that bit of information from the hiring manager that he promised last week, you’d probably be on pace.

The reality is companies have more job openings than they do recruiting man-power. A universal rule of 3 seems to be the sweet spot when it comes to the ideal number of roles that an individual recruiter should be taking on at once. Slice and dice it any way you want but as soon as a recruiter has 4+ unique opportunities working, he or she starts to be spread thin causing their success to be sacrificed. Therefore, yielding a lower response rate from potentially valuable candidates.

5. Love the game

At Vetted Placements, we love this game. We are addicted to the rush and fast paced nature of recruiting. Ask yourself if the person most responsible for talent enjoys this game, in addition, are they setup for success? The answer needs to be unequivocally, yes! The difference for a candidate interviewing with someone who sees it as a preliminary obligation compared to a candidate interviewing with someone excited about the role is night and day.

The ability to acquire knowledge on areas of expertise that otherwise you never would, presents itself every day. We aren’t reading job descriptions to candidates, we are discussing life-changing decisions with them. BIG DIFFERENCE!

It’s competitive out there, so if you aren’t suiting up every day, you are going to get blown out. Just like athletes condition themselves, recruiters must as well. Create good reliable practices and maintain a next play attitude. Embrace the challenges as they are experiences that will make you better next time.